NCAA Basketball: Every conference’s biggest surprise and disappointment for 2018-19

The 2018-19 NCAA Basketball season has come to an end; let’s take a look at the biggest surprises and disappointments in every single conference this season.

Virginia has redeemed themselves and has won the 2019 NCAA Basketball Championship with their title game victory over Texas Tech. This championship game and Final Four were full of unexpected teams and this whole season was full of intriguing moments and surprises. Even though the first weekend of the Tournament was relatively free of upsets, it was still a great month of basketball.

Looking back, it’s almost humorous to see early season projections made about each of these teams. There are teams like Duke and Kentucky who got so close after receiving such high praise before the season ever began. Teams were expected to dominate their conferences, maybe solely based on which recruits and transfers they had assembled on their rosters. We’ll spend months making projections on next season’s results, but sometimes we’re way off on certain teams.

Likewise, there were a number of surprises this season that were missed by many of those preseason projections. The prime example is Texas Tech, who nobody expected could win the Big 12, let alone make an appearance in the national title game. At the mid-major level, there were many more surprises, like the seasons had by teams like Buffalo, Wofford, and Murray State.

We’re going to take some time and break it down to every single conference, identifying the team that was the biggest surprise and the biggest disappointment in each. For clarity, the biggest surprise is a team that did better than expected, even though surprise can also have a negative connotation. Someone stood out, both good and bad, in each of these 32 conferences.

Let’s get right into it and take a look at some of these teams.